Julius Stone Address: What is political progress?
Julius Stone Address: What is political progress? In-person event Progress is both a necessary and a dangerous idea. It is necessary if one is striving to improve the way things are, and it is dangerous because the pursuit of progress has historically often given rise to episodes of paternalism, colonial domination and narratives of …
JSI Seminar: Epistemic privilege and duties of mutual assistance
JSI Seminar: Epistemic privilege and duties of mutual assistance In-person event Victims of oppression are sometimes said to have epistemic privilege in virtue of their marginalised social position into the operation and impact of oppressive social structures. Epistemic privilege sometimes is cited as a basis for deference in social relations between victims and non-victims—for example, …
JSI Workshop: Description and evaluation in contemporary jurisprudence
JSI Workshop: Description and evaluation in contemporary jurisprudence In-person event Modern jurisprudence has been tormented by a divide between description and evaluation in legal theory. Proponents argue that the distinction is essential to any clearheaded discussion of law itself and its relation to adjacent normative systems, especially morality. Opponents insist that being the necessarily normative …
JSI Seminar: The stability of bad things
JSI Seminar: The stability of bad things In-person event Political philosophers have long been concerned with how best to ensure the stability of social orders. Stability is assumed to be a good, whether because whatever is good is better for being stably so, or because stability enables cooperation in the pursuit of whatever other …
JSI Workshop | Towards a Moralisation of Jurisprudence? Reflections on the Future of Legal Philosophy
JSI Workshop | Towards a Moralisation of Jurisprudence? Reflections on the Future of Legal Philosophy In-person event There is a trend in current Anglo-American legal philosophy that is drawing the attention of legal scholars. We could label this trend “The moralisation of jurisprudence”. Its animating idea is as follows: The questions still left open in …
JSI Seminar | Legalizing Assisted Dying: Are We On A Slippery Slope To Involuntary Euthanasia?
JSI Seminar: Legalizing Assisted Dying: Are We On A Slippery Slope To Involuntary Euthanasia? In-person event On 28 November 2023, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act will come into effect in NSW. The Act allows ill persons having decision-making capacity, acting voluntary, and with less than six months to live (12 months in the case of a …
JSI Seminar: The life of international law is not logic but experience
JSI Seminar: The life of international law is not logic but experience In-person event U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously maintained that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Holmes statement suggests an antecedent question: what is the life of the law? This essay construes …
JSI Seminar: Crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence in constitutional courts
JSI Seminar: Crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence in constitutional courts In-person event In Judgment SU-151/2020 the Constitutional Court of Colombia rendered its decision on a constitutional complaint of a group of journalists. They claim that in certain criminal cases concerning possible corruption by government officials, prosecutors and judges were unsatisfyingly prohibiting the press to attend public …
JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theory
JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theory In-person event In this talk, Dr Ntina Tzouvala sets out to defend the potential for legal theory of what Edward Said called ‘contrapuntal reading’, Louis Althusser (drawing from Jacques Lacan) described as ‘symptomatic read-ing’, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick denounced as …
Julius Stone Address: The Legal Experience of Injustice
Julius Stone Address: The Legal Experience of Injustice In-person event In The Faces of Injustice, Judith Shklar criticizes the ‘normal model’ of justice which views injustice as ‘a prelude to or a rejection and breakdown of justice, as if injustice were a surprising abnormality’. Her central insight is that ‘the real realm of injustice … does …